


The Words You Used

by cecilantro



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-05-13 09:07:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14745923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilantro/pseuds/cecilantro
Summary: Nott buys Caleb a diary to writeeverythingin. History, observations, feelings, Mollymauk.Molly catches sight of his name and asks Caleb if he can read it.It's not enough.





	The Words You Used

“Here.” Nott’s voice interrupts Caleb’s transcription, he’s been watching the cart in the new town whilst the others were away and now he’s distracted. Nott drops a book by his feet. It has a tiny silver padlock.   
She holds out two tiny, silver keys.   
“You- you won’t talk, that’s okay, Caleb. You know I’m here if you can, if you need me, but it’s… hard.”   
Caleb swallows. He has no doubt in him as to what she’s talking about.   
“It’s something that someone special recommended to me, once. Something he used to do.”   
Caleb takes the keys, gently, as though the silver will burn him.   
“I had it fitted with a lock, so nobody can read it. I think it’s arcane, too, I paid… for it. But you’ll know better than me.”   
He picks the book up gingerly, as though  _ that _ will burn him. It’s as thick as two fingers, and when he inspects the padlock, there is, in fact, the runes for an arcane lock etched into it and inlaid with gold.   
He looks up to Nott.   
“What- thank you, sorry- what am I meant to do?”   
“You write.” Nott shrugs, “You write your history. You write what hurts. You write what feels good. Anything that forms strong emotions that aren’t hurt, too.” She pauses, tilts her head to him, “Like Molly.”   
He hisses for her quiet and looks around.   
“That’s- it, it happens, Nott, it’s nothing… important.”   
“You know better than to try to lie to  _ me _ Caleb.” Nott levels her gaze at him coolly, “But if you don’t want to talk, I won’t make you.”   
She leans in to him, lays a hand over his,   
“I’m here if, and when, you’re ready for me. You know that, don’t you Caleb?”   
Caleb studies her.    
How could he ever have believed that he didn’t trust her?   
“I know that.” He tells her, quietly but firmly, and the concern stays in her eyes but her expression otherwise evaporates like mist into a grin,   
“Good. I love you, Caleb!” And she’s skittering away, again, off of the cart, and his returned affections choke in his throat.

 

Caleb dedicates a minimum of an hour a day to the book. And he’s a quick writer. When he feels sad, or stressed, he lays two fingers on Nott’s shoulder and pulls in to his lonely corner of the cart to scribble down words and feelings.   
Molly has started, when he sees Caleb go over there, to hand him something to chew on. Whatever is right at the time, because Caleb keeps eating his material components, and it’s getting expensive. One day, Molly hands him mint leaves, another, thyme. Caleb eats it all, often it’s  _ all  _ he eats on the days he retires to the corner.   
Molly kisses his forehead when Caleb says he can.   
“Here if you need me. You know?” Molly asks him, and Caleb looks up and blinks, slowly, Molly smiles because he knows it’s a  _ yes _ , the speech is just too hard for him to manage. And he breezes away.

 

Caleb makes the mistake of leaving the diary open on a desk. They’re in a nice inn, days of travelling, and he trusts Nott with his feelings and stories so he doesn’t think much of it, just leaves it. It’s already half-full, he’s only had it two and a half weeks, and the latest page is a scrawled analysis on the change in Mollymauk’s character around Caleb the closer they become. He’s managed to keep most of the sap out of it, thank the  _ Gods _ .   
“Caleb?” Molly knocks on the door of the room Caleb shares with Nott, and walks in, “Nott? Are you in here?”   
He steps a little further in, to check the beds, it wouldn’t be the first time one or both of them has slept through a wake-up call.   
Except it’s sundown, not sunrise. Molly’s been asleep for 36 hours, doesn’t even know it, turns out recovering from poison can really fuck a man up.   
“Caleb?” He tries again, but the bed remains stubbornly empty, and as he turns to leave, something catches his eye.   
_ Mollymauk _ .   
It’s his name, in Caleb’s scrawl of blue ink on thick paper, a thicker, leather-bound book with a lock beside it. But it’s open, and Molly sees his name.   
Curiosity flares, and he comes to the side of the desk.   
His name is written a few times, but that’s  _ all  _ he reads on the page, frowns as he closes the book’s cover and runs his fingers across it. He’s seen enough diaries in his time to know the privacy of such, and he carefully locks the padlock into place, assumes Caleb has the key to undo it.   
He sits, for a minute, on the end of Caleb’s bed, drumming his fingers against his leg as he begins to adjust and block in the things he’s feeling. There’s a familiar one that he’ll have to deal with, he saves that for last without naming it. The first thing he boxes up is the rush, an excitement sort of feeling with an underlying current of fear, it leaves his head spinning. He puts it into a little mental box and sets it aside, and the world around him stops blurring so much. Next, and it has to be because it’s directly related, is the unnamed feeling that follows, where colours are too bright and the scents of Caleb’s room, the ink and the parchment and the residual sulphur from Nott’s alchemy, they’re all overpowering. The feeling of the scratchy bedclothes under him is amplified too many times, and Molly is happy to cram this one into a too-small box and slip it aside, the world fading back to normal as he does so.   
With those two problems gone, he’s left with just his emotions, plain and simple, and well… that’s much easier to deal with.   
There’s the fear. Why would Caleb be writing about him in a  _ diary _ , because he knows what a diary is, and  _ why _ would Caleb be writing about  _ him _ ? There’s a hundred possibilities that burst from the question and he shakes his head free of them, stupid, he knows the majority are unrealistic. There’s an easy way to find out, anyway, which of them is correct.   
That’s bracketed for later.   
There’s a guilt, then, that he’s seen the diary itself. He hasn’t read it, he never would, and he’s happy with his decision to lock it up again but… he still feels bad.   
And that’s  _ probably _ due to the raging curiosity bubbling in his throat.   
He unbrackets the need to know  _ why, _ it only fuels his curiosity after all, he wants to  _ know _ what’s going on here, he wants to  _ know _ what’s in that diary.    
But he won’t. Won’t touch it, won’t go near it, won’t even  _ look _ at it, now, without Caleb’s permission.   
“So!” He speaks to the empty room, to himself, as he stands up and claps, “To Caleb, then!”   
He turns on his heel, he was looking for Caleb anyway, and strides calmly out of the room.   
_ Calmly _ .

  
He finds Caleb downstairs, drinking quietly, but amicably, with Yasha and Nott. They make light conversation, but it’s sparing, mostly comments on Jester’s bets that they can see from their table.   
“Oh, Molly.” Yasha raises her glass, and Caleb looks round at his name, mimics Yasha,   
“Hello, Mollymauk.”    
“Caleb.” Molly comes to an empty chair and leans both hands on it, his fingers drumming a pattern, “Can I talk with you? Just quickly.”   
Caleb’s eyes are locked hard onto Molly’s fingers, each beat draws the wizard’s shoulders up, gradually more tense.   
He flickers his gaze from Molly’s fingers to his face, and then to Yasha and Nott, watching them both with a sense of concern. He can’t say anything. Not here.   
“Of course.”   
Caleb stands, and Molly comes upright, and the two wander into the stairwell for a more private space of conversation.   
They each pick a wall and lean into it, opposite one another.   
Caleb offers Molly his drink.   
“You are nervous.” He states, eyes on Molly’s over the rim of the glass, “I know you drink when you’re nervous.”   
“Whiskey?” A smile tugs at Molly’s lips, he’s already reaching to take the drink. Caleb smiles too, Molly knows his tastes all too well.   
“Of course.”   
Molly takes it with a grateful nod, takes a couple of gulps from the glass. Caleb watches for every detail, because the way that Molly drinks can say a lot about the way he’s feeling. The guilt of the dropped shoulders, the tense way he holds himself, Molly hands the drink back and Caleb raises his eyebrows.   
“What have you done?”   
Molly is speechless. No words. Caleb is still staring like he wants an answer, though, and he struggles to find the words he needs. There’s a few false starts, Caleb is patient. He reaches out, sets his fingertips, only his fingertips, to Molly’s arm.   
“Take your time.”   
“How could you tell?” Is what Molly eventually comes up with, and Caleb laughs a little, it’s mostly hard breath but it’s beautiful all the same.   
“As with the way you can read others, Mollymauk, I can read you just the same.”   
Molly gives an uneasy smile.   
“Your- your, book, diary, it was on your desk when I went into your room.”   
Caleb stiffens, his eyes widen. Molly sees his knuckles go white with the grip he has on his glass as it tightens.   
“It was open,” he starts, and hears Caleb’s intake of breath, “I saw- my name-”   
Caleb knows the page he’s been working on recently. It’s not the worst, more of an analysis of the way that Molly has a horrifyingly accurate read on when Caleb is about to have a breakdown. But there’s worse in there. There’s Caleb’s history, there’s pages of scrawled notes breaking down the way he still feels when people raise their voice at him, breaking down himself when he’s in situations that remind him too much of Trent. There’s pages and pages of Caleb wondering how Molly tastes. Taking estimates at how warm he is, from the times Caleb has woken up with Molly sprawled over him protectively. A map of each of the scars Molly has that clearly aren’t from his swords, drawings of Molly’s tattoos. And more of why Caleb can’t breathe when anyone mentions the Soltryce Academy. He wishes Fjord the best, but he doesn’t think he can go back there again.   
“Caleb? Darling, are you okay? Are you with me?” Molly is waving in front of his eyes when he blinks his way out of a play-by-play of every page in the book.   
“You had no right reading it, Mollymauk.” Caleb shocks himself with the cold frost to his tone, and Molly winces too, “How- how much  _ did _ you-?”   
“None.” Molly assures, setting a hand lightly to Caleb’s shoulder, “I saw my name, I saw the lock, and I closed it. It’s not my business to read.”   
Caleb relaxes, visibly, and steps in closer to Molly to rest his head on the tiefling’s shoulder.   
“Thank you.” He says, quietly, and Molly tucks an arm around his shoulders and squeezes.   
“I did come to ask you, though,” Molly says softly, to the top of Caleb’s head, he punctuates the sentence with a brief kiss, “If you would allow me to read it.”   
Caleb freezes up again, and Molly squeezes him,   
“If you don’t want me to, Caleb, darling, I understand. I’ll pretend this never happened, I never knew, we’ll never speak of it again.”   
“No.” Caleb says from Molly’s shoulder, and he forces himself to draw up his hands, to Molly’s waist, “It- I- I want you, to read it.”   
This is something of a shock for Molly, and he gently pushes at Caleb’s shoulders until they can talk face-to-face again,    
“Only if you’re sure. Don’t do anything because you think it will please me, Caleb, I know you better than to expect these things from you now.”   
Caleb shakes his head,   
“I… I want you to know, and to understand, that book has the things that I have done. They are things I can never be forgiven for, Mollymauk.”   
Molly’s grip on his shoulders tightens, Caleb doesn’t want him to argue. He’s so tired. He keeps talking,   
“I know that you cannot promise that you won’t be angry, or that you won’t hate me or blame me, once you know what I have done. But I ask that you don’t tell the others. If you want me to leave, I will, I just ask that you keep what you know to yourself. And,” he pauses, shoulders drawn up and tongue bitter at just the thought, “If  _ you  _ want to leave, I understand that, too. Just… please, do not leave without telling me. Say- say goodbye. I don’t deserve it. But please.”   
Molly can’t imagine anything that Caleb could possibly have done that would change the way he feels. He can’t imagine  _ any _ scenario where he isn’t completely, irrevocably, stupidly in love with this wizard, the dirty human with eyes the colour of the sky and magic in his fingertips and his tongue.   
“I won’t tell them anything.” Molly promises, and he kisses Caleb’s forehead. He hopes it feels like a promise, he wants it to be a promise that he’ll never leave. To Caleb, it hurts like a finality does. Like a goodbye in sensation.   
He pulls the keys from his pocket and hands them to Molly, presses them into the palm of his hand just for the pleasure of the feeling of contact.   
“Thank you.” Molly says, quietly, and Caleb forces a weak smile.   
Molly kisses him. Gently. Briefly. They split from one another, Molly heads up the stairs, Caleb downs his drink and goes to buy another on his way back to the table.

 

When Caleb gets to his room that night, trailing a drunk Nott behind him, the diary is gone from his desk.    
He feels sick. He feels regret. He doesn’t feel solid, he hates these feelings and he’d promised he’d never have them again, but here he is.   
“Caleb?” Nott croaks from beside him, drunk but concerned, she frowns up at his distant face. He smiles for her, weak, but he smiles.   
“It’s okay, Nott, I am just thinking about the past. You should go to bed, now. I will get you a glass of water before you sleep.”   
He turns, and Nott sighs as she heads to her bed,   
“I don’t need water! I’ll be fine!” she protests, and he gives a brief, genuine laugh,   
“You say that every time, and you never are. Wait for me to come back, you need to drink.”   
He leaves the room.   
He passes Fjord and Molly’s room, and a solid fifty percent of him aches and strains to burst in there and take his secrets back from Molly’s hands, but he shakes it off. He knows he’s certain. Sometimes, the right decisions are the hardest to make. And they’re the ones that cause the most regret. But he knows what the right decision is, and he’s made it.

  
He returns to Nott struggling very, very hard to stay awake.   
“Caleb!” She grins as he re-enters, and he comes to her side briskly to hand her the glass of water.   
“Careful,” He tells her gently, “we don’t really want to break another glass, they will make us pay this time.”   
Nott chuckles and chugs down the water, still swaying dimly in the darkness. She hands Caleb the empty glass and flumps down.   
“Thanks, Caleb, I love you.”   
He breaks from her to set the empty glass on the desk. The empty space where his diary should be haunts him when he looks at it.   
“Thank you.” is all he manages to get out in reply to Nott, but he needn’t have bothered.    
She’s already asleep, snoring lightly in her bed.   
Caleb empties himself out of his clothes and crawls, slowly, under his covers.   
He can smell lavender. Molly has been here.   
It sets him on edge, whilst he’s conscious, but as he slips away to restless sleep the idea of Mollymauk comes back to the hazy edge of comforting. By the time he goes completely, any thought of the diary is gone from his mind.

  
Molly finishes the book just after 2am, not that he’s really aware of the time.   
He comes to the last page, the half-written analysis of how Molly’s changed, of the way he acts around Caleb, the things he does to help, and skims it over. It’s mostly a clarified repetition of things that Caleb’s already rambled about.   
Molly is somewhat more bothered by the  _ history _ part.   
Who else knows? He thinks about it, and assumes Nott, and then comes to Beau. He remembers the night they changed, the night she started to watch for him more, the night she came to him. He was in a blissful haze, and she’d pulled him by the hair into the hallway because the Gods knew she couldn’t pull the tapestry, that was an eyeful she didn’t want.   
She’d rocked him hard into the wall and pinned him there.   
“Caleb.” She’d said, flatly, and Molly had smiled. Like an idiot.   
“Caleb?”   
She’d swallowed as she’d struggled with what to say to him. Molly assumes, now, that it was her trying to find a way to get Molly to help Caleb without telling him  _ why _ .   
“He’s… he’s not like us.” She’d managed, eventually, “He doesn’t see enemies in the humans that fight us.”   
“Just humans?” Molly’s smart tongue hadn’t caught the serious tone of the conversation, and Beau had fucking backhanded him so hard the world had spun around him, he bit his tongue on the yelp that followed.    
“And elves. Things like us. That have thoughts, that have families.  _ Things that have families _ , Molly, that’s what he sees. They could be coming at him with a greatsword, and Caleb doesn’t just see the fucker with a sword, he sees the mother that loves that criminal. He sees the father that taught him how to fight. He sees the children that call him  _ dad _ when he goes home at night with cuts and bruises and stolen money.”   
Molly had been so busy with his pain, but this had caught him.   
How had Beau known the way Caleb worked?   
He knows, now, the emphasis of  _ family _ .    
Of course Beau had known.   
Molly had taken it to heart after that, changed his view of Caleb, too.   
He closes Caleb’s diary, slowly, locks it, and lets his brain slowly begin to box off the things in there. It’s stunningly silent.   
He stands without actively willing it, he moves before he can tell himself not to, and he lurches in his own mind but surrenders to it. He knows what his body is doing, and he’ll kick into it when his body wants him to.   
He moves silently out of the room he shares with Fjord, and into the hallway, and down the hallway.   
He comes back to his own body outside of Caleb’s door, and tries the handle.   
Unlocked.   
He goes in.   
Caleb’s asleep.   
Nott’s asleep.   
He sets the diary down on Caleb’s desk, puts the keys gently on top, and he hears stirring behind him.   
He turns, Caleb sits up in bed,   
“Mollymauk?”   
It is, again, as though Molly’s body moves without his permission. He turns and moves to the bed and sits and bundles Caleb up into the  _ tightest _ fucking hug he’s ever given anyone.   
“I love you.” He says, quietly, into Caleb’s neck. “I love you so much, Caleb. I love you.” and it becomes something of a mantra, he’s started and can’t stop, and Caleb jams a hand to his own mouth to muffle his sobs.   
“It doesn’t change anything, Caleb, I’m not going anywhere, I love you.” Molly’s torrent doesn’t stop, and Caleb only cries harder, “I don’t hate you. I don’t blame you. I  _ want you here _ , Caleb, I love you, and  _ I want you _ .”   
Caleb is shaking, violently and silently, against Molly, and Molly is holding him so tight he thinks he might snap the wizard in half, but he can’t bear to lighten up.    
They sit, and stay, and Molly’s shoulders begin to ache but he doesn’t loosen his grip even a little bit until Caleb’s sobs subside, down to the odd hiccup. Then, and only then, does he draw away just enough to meet Caleb’s eyes.   
There’s words. He’s been preparing speech after speech as he read through Caleb’s words, but they all flicker away now. He’s thrown into an ocean of void and thick air, the stars glitter and go out around him and all that’s left is Caleb’s eyes. Thin rings of sky blue in the dull light from the moon outside the window, guiding Molly home.   
He kisses Caleb.    
It’s all that he can think to do. The only thing that comes anywhere  _ near _ close to being enough, and it still  _ isn’t _ . Molly doesn’t think it ever will be. But Caleb presses back, and that’ll do, Molly spends the time documenting, mentally, boxing in everything. The way that he feels. The light sense of not being solid, boxed off and stored. The way the moonlight looks on the glimmer of tears under Caleb’s eyelashes, saved. The exact pressure and direction and way that Caleb kisses him.    
Caleb is doing the same, to his end, already blocking up the comparison between his thoughts and the sensation and how he could never truly capture, in words, the way that Molly tastes. The way that his own breath, heavy with the tears and the relief, turns to starlight in his throat and glimmers in the push-and-pull of his lungs.    
Then they’re falling, thumping to the pillow with only one quick bite of a tongue- Molly’s- and Caleb kisses him harder for the coppery taste of blood, for the danger of Molly’s sharp fangs and the trust that the tiefling will never hurt him without his say so. Will never leave him in the middle of the night.   
Molly breaks their kiss to press one to the hollow of Caleb’s collarbone. There was a half page about this, he remembers, in the diary, and Caleb’s breath catches.   
Molly bubbles with something he doesn’t understand, draws a steady line of slow kisses along Caleb’s collarbone, up to his shoulder, and there he pauses to give just the briefest nip to the place he feels the softest, thinnest skin.   
Caleb squeaks, and Molly soothes and apologises and moves back up to kiss him, strokes his hair and his cheek and tells him like a broken record, that he loves him, that he won’t leave, that Caleb is his, he’s Caleb’s, that everything will be okay.

Caleb doesn’t believe it.

He can never believe it.

But he comes closer than he ever has before, and it’s not enough, it will never be enough.   
But it’ll do.

**Author's Note:**

> WHATS UP IM LUKE IM 19 AND THIS IS MY *MASTERPIECE*


End file.
